"Sarah's Key" Review

As someone who has always been passionate about reading, it seemed natural for me to start a Jewish Book Circle in order to share that love of books with members of our congregation and community. And though my original plan was to select solid non-fiction books about Jewish themes, I was convinced to start with a highly-praised work of fiction, Sarah’s Key, by the French writer Tatiana de Rosnay.

One of the ground rules I set for our Jewish Book Circle is that anything we select has to be not only interesting but have significance. It has to be serious, we have to learn something from it, whether it is fiction or non-fiction.

Sarah’s Key is just such a book. Though I finished it a few weeks ago, I am still thinking about it and have the feeling it will always linger within me. “It will make you cry – and remember,” wrote the New York Times reviewer, a sentiment with which I concur wholeheartedly.

As someone who has read widely about the Holocaust over the years, I am ashamed to say Sarah’s Key describes an event I knew nothing about but should have.

We’ve all seen the old movies of Hitler strutting through Paris, touring his conquest. But few of us have asked what happened to the Jews of that same city and of France. In 1942, they were rounded up not by SS troops but by French police, who were assigned the task to make it easier for the Germans. The French police, with whom the Jews of Paris had enjoyed cordial relations before, now exhibited an indifference to human suffering and a measure of brutality wholly unexpected.

Squeezed into a small stadium in the center of Paris, thousands of Jews were held under the most ghastly conditions while waiting to be ultimately deported to a local camp and then on to Auschwitz.

Sarah’s Key describes that roundup through the eyes of young Sarah, an 11-year-old Jewish girl who lives with her parents and younger brother in the Jewish section of Paris. When the French police come for the family, the father is away, and Sarah convinces her mother that her little brother is with him.

The reality is otherwise. Thinking the family will be returning home in just a few hours, Sarah has locked her little brother in a cupboard with plenty of food and water for the day. Inside her pocket is the key which will be used to release him as soon as they get back that night.

But they will not be coming back, and Sarah’s key haunts the young girl as her extraordinary journey grows longer and longer.

But running alongside the story of Sarah and her own experience is a parallel story which takes place 60 years later, a story that at first appears to be disconnected, but predictably becomes intertwined with Sarah’s.

In the second story, a middle-aged woman named Julia, born in America but living in 2002 in Paris with her French husband, is assigned by her publisher to write a story about the 60th anniversary of the deportation.

Her interest and outrage grows as she learns more about the complicity of the French police and people in allowing the inhumane treatment of more than 13,000 Jews, including thousands of children; and as she learns, too, about the way Sarah’s life intersected that of her husband’s family 60 years earlier.

Though the author’s descriptions of what the Jews endured while interned in Paris is harsh, the book is not grisly. And as the two stories begin to intersect, ponderous questions are raised that not only rattle the characters but us the readers.

It is, for example, impossible not to ask – both from Sarah’s story and from Julia’s – how we might have acted had we been Christian Parisians who faced the moral dilemma of assisting Jews, knowing the dangers it might have brought us and our own families.

Sarah’s Key is filled with people who looked the other way or worse, and with people as well who surely would deserve a place on the Avenue of the Righteous at Yad Vashem.

It is not a new question, but as always, when it comes to moral dilemmas, it becomes more complicated when the people involved have names and faces with whom we identify and care about.

The book asks another painful question, too: What right do we have to tell people things that we think they should know, even when such things will almost certainly cause them pain? Should we, for example, in our own lives, tell a friend that her husband is cheating on her? Is that our obligation? Our right? Or should we be silent. Can we?

Those who have given negative reviews of Sarah’s Key have based their disappointment on precisely this. And yet, as you will see when you read this extraordinary book, the way this is developed by Tatiana de Rosnay is both poignant and very human. Yet the question persists, not just for the characters in the book, but for us even today.

I took from this book, too, a clearer understanding of why so many Holocaust survivors struggled for so long after their liberation before they could begin talking about what they experienced. As a child growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, I was not exposed to survivors as our children are today. In those post-war years, Holocaust memoirs were scarce; Holocaust museums were scarcer.

The normal inclination of people who have been through a great ordeal is to tell everyone about it – but it was not so with survivors of the Holocaust. Many chose explicitly to remain quiet and many are uncomfortable telling their stories even today, while others are now able to go out into the community and speak to schools or teach at the local Holocaust museum.

In Sarah’s Key, we can better understand the reticence; we can understand the silence. And at the same time, we can appreciate the courage it has taken for those who experienced such things to speak about them again and again and again.

I once asked a Holocaust survivor in our congregation if he ever felt guilty at having survived when other members of his family did not. “No,” he said, “not guilty. But I feel a responsibility to make sure what happened to them is never forgotten – and never happens again.”

For some, though, there was a feeling of guilt, like the guilt of the mother in Sophie’s Choice over having to decide which child to save and which child to let die.

Sarah’s Key confronts this issue in its own way, on its own terms, and even though it is fiction, I knew reading it that the events it described were played out in real life by so very many.

It has been a long time since I read a novel that not only educated me, but grabbed me and moved me like Sarah’s Key. Anyone who reads it, I think, will be deeply rewarded.

Our November Selection: "Sarah's Key"

By Tatiana de Rosnay

Purchase locally or order online by clicking here
I will review this book in my sermon at Beth Yeshurun, Friday night, Nov. 27, 6 p.m.

Deciding which book should be the inaugural selection of our new Jewish Book Circle wasn't easy. I received many, many suggestions, both as posts on this blog and via individual emails. The most popular suggestion was Songs for the Butcher's Daughter; however, because it is being read by several other reading circles in town, I decided to go a different direction by selecting another book which also comes highly recommended, Tatiana de Rosnay's wonderful Sarah's Key.

Here's what Publisher's Weekly had to say about this powerful novel: "De Rosnay's U.S. debut fictionalizes the 1942 Paris roundups and deportations, in which thousands of Jewish families were arrested, held at the Vélodrome d'Hiver outside the city, then transported to Auschwitz. Forty-five-year-old Julia Jarmond, American by birth, moved to Paris when she was 20 and is married to the arrogant, unfaithful Bertrand Tézac, with whom she has an 11-year-old daughter. Julia writes for an American magazine and her editor assigns her to cover the 60th anniversary of the Vél' d'Hiv' roundups. Julia soon learns that the apartment she and Bertrand plan to move into was acquired by Bertrand's family when its Jewish occupants were dispossessed and deported 60 years before. She resolves to find out what happened to the former occupants: Wladyslaw and Rywka Starzynski, parents of 10-year-old Sarah and four-year-old Michel. The more Julia discovers—especially about Sarah, the only member of the Starzynski family to survive—the more she uncovers about Bertrand's family, about France and, finally, herself. Already translated into 15 languages, the novel is De Rosnay's 10th (but her first written in English, her first language). It beautifully conveys Julia's conflicting loyalties, and makes Sarah's trials so riveting, her innocence so absorbing, that the book is hard to put down."

The reviews of Sarah's Key have been uniformly glowing. Some examples:

"A haunting, riveting novel... This book grabs your heart in the opening chapter, and its scenes and characters stay with you long after you finish." —Publishers Weekly, a PW 2008 Staff Pick

“Masterly and compelling, it is not something that readers will quickly forget. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal, Starred Review

“A powerful novel… Tatiana de Rosnay has captured the insane world of the Holocaust and the efforts of the few good people who stood up against it in this work of fiction more effectively than has been done in many scholarly studies. It is a book that makes us sensitive to how much evil occurred and also to how much willingness to do good also existed in that world.” —Rabbi Jack Riemer, South Florida Jewish Journal

“This is a remarkable historical novel... it's a book that impresses itself upon one's heart and soul forever.” –Naomi Ragen, author of The Saturday Wife

As you read the book, you are invited to post reactions on this blog or read those submitted by others. At our Friday night service Nov. 27, I will speak about Sarah's Key and, needless to say, it would be a pleasure to have you there. Along the way, I may post some observations of my own; feel free to agree or disagree!

I hope you enjoy our Jewish Book Circle's first selection and, as before, I'm open to suggestions for December and upcoming months.

—Rabbi Rosen